Product Search Replaces Bing Shopping
A new post published on the Bing Search Blog announced the demise of current Bing Shopping appraoch, which will now be replaced by integrated shopping results presented the same way as any other search engine results.
The new Bing system will be known as Product Search, and merchants will be able to have their results highlighted in exchange for a fee. Bing says the change is in line with consumer behavior that demands as few clicks as possible between the home page and the results they are seeking.
Paid Product Ads and Rich Captions
By paying a fee, merchants can have their products appear in what Bing is calling Product Ads, which will appear in a sidebar to the right of the blue link search results. Each product ad will include an image of the product, the hotlinked name of the product, the price and the name of the merchant itself. Of course, merchants can still have their products included in Bing’s search results using SEO techniques without paying any sort of fee at all.
One new feature that merchants can take advantage of free of charge is Rich Captions. These will allow merchants to place a product’s price and whether the product is in stock or out of stock immediately below the URL and above the meta description in search results.
In order to achieve this, you’ll need to make sure that your URLs are easily searchable and contain the product’s make and model. Bing will then automatically draw pricing and availability info from your product listing and embed it in the search results.
In order to activate Rich Captions, you’ll need to click a check box for it in the Bing Merchant Center settings area within your account.